


Doubt the Stars Are Fire

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends, 幽☆遊☆白書 | YuYu Hakusho: Ghost Files
Genre: Adults, Crossover, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Mystery, last i checked there were no fics for this crossover and that needed rectified, may contain some:
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2018-08-07 17:15:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7723027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natsume blinked. "Who?"</p><p>"A dreadful being! They say that he was killed, and faced down the judge of the dead in battle, so that he returned to life a powerful sorcerer. That he was then defeated by a stronger sorcerer, but rose again the most powerful of demons to take his revenge! They say he struck down the King of Hell and raised a new one in his place!" The little mid-level finally let go of Natsume's jacket to press horrified fists to his own forehead. "<em>Killing him would do no good!</em>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The sun was setting as Natsume followed the road beside the river home, and he was alone except for Nyanko-sensei, who had met him at the school gates. This had happened before, usually with the excuse that it was to be expected for a bodyguard, but with the actual purpose of demanding Natsume buy him something to eat. He hadn't demanded anything today, or said much, although he'd muttered to himself once or twice.

It had been two days since Natsume had seen any spirit other than his cat. At one time this would have been an immense relief, and it was still nice not to have been woken up at odd hours since Monday, or threatened for the Book of Friends except in a desultory sort of way, by Nyanko-sensei. But he had gotten so used to seeing the friendlier neighborhood ayakashi, and…he might be beginning to worry. He glanced down at the squat round figure walking beside him, wondering if Sensei was likely to say anything useful, if Natsume asked whether he thought they were alright.

Probably not.

"Sensei?" he hazarded anyway, as the road curved along the river where his spirit friends had once thrown a party and invited him.

"Mm?" Nyanko-sensei grunted absently, eyes fixed intently on a little yellow butterfly as it fluttered slowly to perch on a grass stem.

"Do you know where all the ayakashi—" His bodyguard flung himself facefirst into the tall grass, scattering early-spring flower petals and startling the butterfly into the air. "Have gone?" Natsume added after a second, when Nyanko-sensei seemed to have finished rolling end over end.

"What do I care? Idiots!" The cat-shaped spirit sniffed in affront, got his stubby legs under him, and shuffled off with a great rattling of grass and weeds, muttering angrily. Natsume sighed. Sensei chose really inconvenient moments to embarrass himself sometimes. He'd ask again after dinner, maybe.

He kept going along the scenic route, in no particular hurry—year-end exams were coming in just a few weeks and he had lots of studying to do, but not much assigned work, and the last two days without ayakashi interruptions had left him ahead of himself. The sun was bright and the days were warming up nicely, and he thought maybe when he got home he'd see if Touko-san would like help in the garden.

He was nearly through the last trees before the house when the tall grass rattled again. He turned toward the sound to watch a distinctive trail of disturbed stems shooting right toward him.

His neck prickled. "Nyanko-sensei?"

No response. Natsume took a step back. The rattling stopped, just the other side of a fallen log. Something leapt up.

Like a manju fired out of a cannon, Nyanko-sensei burst from the trees on the _opposite_ side of the road and _slammed_ the ayakashi to the ground. It screamed.

"Oh," said Nyanko-sensei, some of his smugness falling away. "It's just you. What do _you_ want?" he demanded, baring his teeth into One-Eye's face.

"Ahaha…nothing, Madara-sama!" the little creature quaked.

Natsume had never expected to be this happy to see One-Eye. "It's okay, let him go, sensei," he encouraged. "Where's your friend?" He didn't think he'd ever seen the two midlevels apart before.

"Natsume-sama!" One-Eye burst out rather than answer, scrambling onto his knees, while Nyanko-sensei withdrew to lick loftily at a forepaw.

"Hey." Natsume sank onto one knee to get a better view of the cowering little oni. "Is everything okay?"

The little figure grabbed at the front of Natsume's uniform jacket and tugged at it urgently. "Natsume-sama, it's terrible!" he burst out. "You have to hide!"

"Eh?" asked Natsume. The back of his neck prickled again and he cast a look around. There was no suspicious mounting shadow, no burst of chilling wind or rattle in the leaves. He bent so that the ayakashi could speak more quietly, but the grip on his jacket didn't loosen. "Hide?" he asked quietly. "Why?"

"Something terrible is coming!"

"Terrible…what?"

One-Eye looked furtively from side to side. "The burning man!"

Natsume frowned. The mid-level spirit wasn't what he would call brave, but he'd never seen him _this_ scared. So scared he wasn't even asking Natsume to help, just warning him. And fire…fire could be so very dangerous. "Who?"

"A dreadful being! They say that he was killed, and faced down the judge of the dead in battle, so that he returned to life a powerful sorcerer. That he was then defeated by a stronger sorcerer, but rose again the most powerful of demons to take his revenge! They say he struck down the King of Hell and raised a new one in his place!" One-Eye finally let go of Natsume's jacket to press horrified fists to his own forehead. " _Killing him would do no good!_ "

Natsume swallowed. Rumors, it was only rumors, but every ayakashi in Fukuoka seemed to know about _him_ lately. Which meant that…the rumor network didn't carry information badly all the time, even if the accuracy of anything the mid-levels said was to be treated with caution. Even if only the tiniest amount of this was true, this kind of a person…

It also meant that this newcomer might hear about Natsume, assuming any local spirit _spoke_ to whatever-it-was rather than finding a hole to hide in. He could only hope someone so powerful would have no interest in the Book of Friends. "And he's coming here?"

One-Eye tugged at his beard in distress. "Two days ago we felt his approach, like a wave across the land. He is very near! He is hiding himself now, so no one can say if he passes from place to place, or sits in the forest awaiting some moment to strike, but he is _here somewhere!_ Oh, he is here! We have heard, he has killed so many, so _many_ …he could spear us like frogs and munch us like dango!"

"Shh!" Natsume looked toward the warning hiss and felt a little of his worry fade at the horned face of One-Eye's companion peering from the base of a shrub at the edge of the treeline. "Don't shout! The Burning Man could be anywhere!"

One-Eye seemed to shrink a little further. "We have to get back to hiding," he told Natsume in a loud whisper. "Be careful, Natsume-sama!"

The reason he hadn't seen any spirits in two days was that they were all hiding from the least possibility of this Burning Man. "Did you come out of hiding just to warn me?"

One-Eye shuffled his feet. "And we were out of supplies."

Cow-Face produced a slightly weak grin and held up a bottle of sake in each hand. Natsume smiled a little. If they were still making booze runs, it couldn't be _too_ bad.

After seeing the two mid-levels on their way back to wherever they'd chosen to cower, Natsume went back to following the road home, unsettled. He looked down at the trotting figure of his bodyguard.

"Nyanko-sensei," he said again.

"Hm?"

"Have you heard of an ayakashi like that?"

The ball of fur shrugged. "Eh. What do I care about newborns? Even if he's powerful, he's got a while to go before anyone should take him seriously."

"What they said about coming back from Hell…"

He sniffed. "Infants are big braggers, that's all."

There was some kind of lie in Nyanko-sensei's voice—he wasn't very good at hiding things. Natsume's steps slowed to a stop as he thought, and Nyanko-sensei's industrious waddle took him several feet ahead before he noticed and stopped. "Keep up!" he barked over his shoulder.

"Sensei…" Natsume said slowly. "Did you feel him coming, too?"

"Don't ask stupid questions! There's nothing strange in the woods! If you're going to be dawdling like this, you might as well carry me!"

Natsume bent down to pick his bodyguard up and walked the rest of the way home without responding to the cat's mutterings about what a terrible pet Natsume was. The day was still beautiful, but somehow he couldn't enjoy it as much anymore. Still, he was happy to know that everyone was still okay. Hiding was much better than if everyone had been driven away, or purified, or had some other terrible thing happen to them.

He hoped the Burning Man demon moved on without making any trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been in my computer for ages; I was inspired to come back to it by the Go Natsume Go! Updates will be unpredictable. ^^


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is not dead! Just...dormant. Slow-moving. A fair-weather fic. (Actually that latter might be slightly literal, I cannot write this story during the winter, it just does not happen.) 
> 
> Anyway here's more for you wonderful people who informed me it's worth working out the kinks!

Natsume was, once again, allowed to sleep through the night, without any unexpected visitors or attackers coming in the window. The ayakashi were still in hiding the next day, and Natsume went to school with a faint, heavy sense of foreboding that he tried to ignore. It was less distracting than when something only he could sense kept interrupting the lesson, but it wasn’t _helping_ him concentrate.

It was nice to be well-rested, though. Exam tension was running high now that it was March and senior year was approaching, and Natsume was feeling it more than usual. He was getting used to having somebody to disappoint. It wasn’t _exactly_ a bad feeling.

School itself proceeded normally, until gym class. Natsume had never really liked gym—he wasn’t as fragile as he looked, but he wasn’t especially strong or coordinated, and he was rarely aggressive enough to score points and didn’t always know the rules to games. But the really bad part was how in gym class you sometimes had to work in teams. Being the strange outsider nobody liked had always been especially difficult then, and Natsume was no good at teamwork even when people didn’t go out of their way to exclude him.

It had been better at this school, because he had friends. Nishimura and Kitamoto had pulled him around after them for much of first year, and after Kitamoto had been moved into a different class for second year Nishimura had glommed onto Natsume especially hard for all partnered activities.

Anyway, Natsume had started not-minding gym months ago, but when his class got to gym and things were different than normal, his first reaction was still worry. Probably would have been even if he _hadn’t_ already been filled with general foreboding.

The teacher waiting for them in the gymnasium was not thick-necked, jovial Akihana-sensei, but a younger man. He wasn’t very tall or even very big, and he couldn’t have been past twenty-five, but his sleeveless green shirt showed off the kind of wickedly defined arm and shoulder muscles you didn’t normally see unless someone really _worked_ at it. He wore green track pants with a white stripe down the outside and brand new black sneakers, and stood with his feet braced at shoulder width and his hands behind his back, and his chin thrust out in a way that somehow emphasized his slicked-back hair, like he’d designed his head for aerodynamic efficiency.

He looked like someone who’d grown out of youth gangs _probably_ without joining the yakuza, he looked like city people, and he very clearly did not belong in their sleepy little town.

“Okay, brats,” was his opening line, “I’m your gym teacher for the next week or two, probably through to break, ‘til Akihana gets back from his I-had-a-baby party thing.” Paternity leave, Natsume assumed. Akihana-sensei hadn’t mentioned his wife was expecting. “So get lined up or something. ‘gainst that wall. Hurry up.” The man then blew a few blasts on his whistle, so far as Natsume could tell just for the fun of it.

“Right,” he continued once everyone was lined up, “so I’m supposed to call the roll here, but that’s boring and everybody skips gym anyway, so say ‘yes’ if you’re here and ‘no’ if you aren’t, and save time.”

Natsume joined in with the ragged chorus of dutiful ‘yes’es, and thought those bright black eyes lingered on him a little strangely, and felt a shiver run up his spine. He wasn’t sure he understood what it was, but the substitute gym teacher gave him a bad feeling.

Although maybe that was just because the man was crazy. Nishimura certainly said so, in the flurry of leaning into walls and panting for breath after they were all made to run twelve laps around the gym while the man in the green track pants jogged alongside and shouted really _strange_ things at the slow ones. Things that were probably supposed to be either insults or encouragements, or both, but a lot of which just sounded like he’d put a lot of words in a hat, drawn out a handful, and shouted them.

“That…man…is…crazy,” Natsume’s round-faced friend gasped, having put on a sprint for the last half-lap in the attempt to stop sensei from telling him about the mutant mulberry tree from a mutant mulberry grove that had clearly nourished his ancestors. He had not appreciated getting one of the more coherent insults, even if he couldn’t work out if he was supposed to be a silkworm or not.

“Mm,” Natsume agreed. Preoccupied by the prickle he kept feeling on the back of his neck. He wanted to ask Nishimura if it looked like the new teacher was watching him, but he looked crazy enough by accident without asking paranoid questions.

“Okay, so you’re all warmed up pretty good now,” their substitute announced, not at all out of breath, when even poor overweight Fukurou-san had puffed to the end of his last lap. He held up a bulging canvas bag in each hand and flashed a grin that seemed far too full of teeth. “Time to play ball.”

Dodgeball...was not one of Natsume’s favorite games.

* * *

 

Nishimura dragged Natsume after him when he met Kitamoto in the school yard, after classes let out. Tanuma was there, too, not physically grabbed by the wrist but still looking slightly lost. Natsume wondered if _he_ still looked that baffled when the duo unexpectedly solicited his company. Nishimura let him go, now that they were here, to punch Kitamoto on the arm.

“You couldn’t have told us about the new P.E. teacher?”

His taller friend rubbed the spot with an exaggerated grimace. “I did tell you!”

“Yeah, ‘we’ve got a substitute for gym.’ Not ‘the P.E. substitute is a crazy man who I cannot be _lieve_ got teaching credentials.’”

Kitamoto grinned. It had definitely been on purpose. “I thought you’d appreciate it better as a surprise. Did he make you line up in height order, too?”

“No. But does he ever love that whistle. Natsume jumped about a mile when he blew it right behind him.” The humor drained from Nishimura, then, and he made a funny sort of grimace, folding his arms behind his head. “Really, though, I was getting worried. Seemed like he was all over Natsume all the time. Every excuse.”

Natsume winced as the taller of his two most normal friends frowned, leaned forward a little, and cut a thoughtful look at him. “Urameshi was riding Natsume?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Nishimura confirmed. “I can’t figure it out. I mean, Okubo was acting up all period and Urameshi just ignored him right up until he benched him, but—”

“He just _benched_ him?” Kitamoto rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully, giving Nishimura the chance to move the conversation on if he wasn’t interested in the hinted story, but the shorter boy leaned forward expectantly, and his tall friend expanded, “See, in our class, Yamagata kept giving him grief—testing him, I guess, to see what he could get away with—and he wound up standing in the corner on one foot with a plastic cone on his head.” He paused. “That _might_ have been because Tanuma passed out same time as Yamagata hit him. With a ball, I mean.”

“You passed out?” Natsume asked sharply, taking a step nearer Tanuma, as though he might do it again. Which was, admittedly, always possible, but unlike most people, Natsume usually had some warning before it happened, since he could see the things that usually caused it.

Tanuma had been giving Natsume concerned looks about the hinted pedagogical bullying until Kitamoto had revealed Tanuma’s own P.E. misfortune, and Natsume had been avoiding his gaze for that same period; now they switched places, Tanuma showing the faintest trace of a flush as he gazed fixedly at a point in space near his own right elbow. There were no invisible creatures there to account for this fascination.

“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “It wasn’t Yamagata-kun’s fault, though.”

“Well, everyone except Urameshi knew you can be a little…wobbly, sure, but Yamagata was being a jerk,” Kitamoto insisted. “The _first_ thing he focused on was how it wasn’t his fault, before anyone made sure you were okay or anything.”

“You are okay, though?” Natsume persisted.

“I’m fine.” Tanuma glanced across his three friends and appeared to find them dubious. He raised his hands with a faint, embarrassed smile. “Really. It was just…yesterday during gym.”

“He got to sit out the rest of class, but he was fine during Math,” Kitamoto agreed. “Of course, you sit down for math _anyway_ …”

“I’m really fine,” Tanuma insisted. “But Natsume, he’s not…” he floundered, trying to find the right way to ask whether the gym teacher was giving him _too_ much trouble.

Natsume smiled. “It’s nothing,” he assured them all. It really wasn’t, he didn’t know why Nishimura was so bothered. He hadn’t gotten that much more attention than anyone else. “He probably just thinks my hair is suspicious.” It wasn’t his fault it was abnormally pale. Lots of teachers had suspected him of bleaching it, but it just grew this way. He guessed it came from Reiko along with the second sight, though who knew where she’d gotten it.

Tanuma’s expression got worried again, but Nishimura and Kitamoto made sympathetic grimaces, and Nishimura slapped him on the back in an encouraging sort of way. “But seriously, I’m thinking more about exams than stupid classes like gym,” he went on, airily. “I mean, it’s hard to flunk gym so long as you _show up_ more than half the time and have working arms and legs. Well, actually, they probably don’t flunk you for being disabled, that’d be a little….”

Kitamoto laughed, and even Natsume and Tanuma smiled.

“C’mon,” Nishimura continued, “everybody come over to my house and let’s have a study party. My mom will be so impressed we’re working hard she’ll make extra-good snacks.”

Natsume thought that sounded like an excellent, if slightly intimidating even after this long, idea. And if not seeing a single ayakashi all the way to Nishimura’s house made something small and cold happen in his chest, it was still a lot better than the terror and bewilderment that used to follow him everywhere, before Nyanko-sensei replaced it. Everybody was just staying out of the Burning Man’s way. It would blow over. Hopefully nobody would be badly hurt in the process.

Whether it would blow over without dragging him into it first was another question, but at this point he almost hoped it would. At least then he might be able to _do_ something.

* * *

 

Gym class continued for the rest of the week to be strange and unpredictable. Urameshi-sensei didn’t seem to have any particular system of physical education he was pursuing, and on several occasions made up ‘house rules’ to games everyone already knew how to play to ‘make them more interesting.’

Also, on Wednesday he made them play Blind Man’s Bluff and made Natsume go blindfolded first, which meant groping his way through the gymnasium blind and hoping he didn’t accidentally grab a girl somewhere rude, a hesitance which had left him in the role of Blind Man for nearly a third of the period. On the bright side, nobody tried to trip him.

Meanwhile, the spirits remained in hiding. Occasionally Natsume would catch sight of someone out of the corner of his eye—a wisp here, one of the tiny masked tengu ducking under a broad leaf there, and once Misuzu looming up over the forest in the evening, looking comfortably unconcerned by the lurking firestorm that even Natsume had begun to think he could feel, in some nebulous way he would not have had words for, if they hadn’t been handed to him already.

Misuzu probably had no business being such a comforting sight.

It was on Friday that something changed. Not at school—that remained the same balance of comfortable, dull, and nerve-searingly tense it had been since exams started to loom, with perhaps a few additional ratchets in the last category by the day. Urameshi’s contribution to this atmosphere was alternately to tighten it with insanity and relax it with absurdity, and on Friday he did slightly more of the latter, so it wasn’t that.

No, the change was in the other part of his life—and even then, only subtly, a strange rise in tension that began as he left school, and followed him home.

Sitting over his homework in early evening, wishing he had taken better notes a month and a half ago when they had been studying this part even if there _had_ been a small tribe of tiny radish spirits daringly exploring the classroom, Natsume glanced out the window. He knew what this was. He could feel something watching him, and…it didn’t feel like it wanted to hurt him, necessarily, but it felt _creepy_. Like knives running down his spine but not pressing hard enough to cut. Maybe, a little, like fire? He hoped it wasn’t the Burning Man, because no one paid him this kind of attention except Matoba and people who wanted the Book of Friends, and either type of interest from such a person would be extremely worrying.

If he could spot it and talk to it and get whatever-it-was over with now, then maybe he could focus on his homework and maybe even sleep through the night an eighth day in a row….

It took him a second to realize what he was looking at, and then he stumbled back from the window with a shout. _Urameshi-sensei_ was standing in the trees that screened the Fujiwaras’ property form their neighbors. On an _upper branch_ of one of the trees, that should be barely wide enough to hold him without bending, feet planted like he was on solid ground, staring across the lawn _straight into Natsume’s window_.

Nyanko-sensei had leapt up onto the windowsill, bristling, as soon as Natsume recoiled, and with a snarl he launched himself out the window.

He couldn’t jump all the way to the trees in this form, but he hit the ground running and scampered over grass at his top speed to vanish into the underbrush.

Natsume looked up, into the trees again, but his gym teacher had already vanished. As if he’d never been there at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Dn-dnnn!_
> 
>  
> 
> Okay, I admit, this is doubtlessly much less stressful for the audience than the main character. =^-^=


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to everyone who's left comments over the past fifteen months of me not posting anything on this story. Even if I'm slow, it's really motivating that other people care about my silly crossover idea. Please excuse its many imperfections! <3

Fujiwara Touko was spending a peaceful late-afternoon gardening. It had been a warm March so far, more like April, and she was eager to get the ground in order for the growing season. The gladiolus were already coming up, and she was carefully loosening the soil around them, the better to get the weeds out without damaging any of her perennials.

She wasn’t as young as she used to be, though, so she straightened up when her back gave its first twinge and leaned back on her heels, letting her spine set itself to rights. The sky was such a lovely color, not as deep a blue as it got later in the year, but very bright.

Then, suddenly, Takashi-kun’s cat let out an enraged yowl that might even have been _frightened_ , and Touko almost tipped over backward. She had gotten to her feet, dropped her trowel, and begun to hurry around the corner of the house almost before she knew it. It wasn’t far, but when she got there, there was nothing to see but Takashi hanging half out his window, staring wide-eyed into the bushes.

“Takashi-kun?” she called up. “Is everything alright?”

He flinched, as he often did at even the most innocuous questions—not nearly as often as he had two years ago, she consoled herself. His eyes flicked to the top of the nearest tree, back down into the bushes, and over to her. “Uh—yes—Nyanko-sensei just, uhm, saw a…squirrel.”

This explanation didn’t _quite_ have the ring of truth, but since it didn’t seem like a wild dog had managed to jump through his bedroom window or anything else actually dangerous, Touko decided to let it go. Takashi-kun had had a difficult life, and hated to trouble anyone, and the last thing she wanted to do was make him feel he needed to try _harder_ to hide his difficulties from her and Shigeru.

It wasn’t quite that he was a wild creature, like a feral cat that needed to be tamed, because he was a very _polite_ boy most of the time, but his trust needed winning in the same patient way.

“Is he alright?” she asked. She was so fond of that silly beast, it was enough to make her wonder why they’d never gotten a cat before.

“He went after it,” Takashi-kun said uncomfortably. “It’s okay, I’ll go after him. You don’t need to help. I’m sure he’s fine.”

Touko had heard that cats always landed on their feet, but if she hadn’t seen examples of their fat little feline’s prodigious jumping abilities she’d never have believed it. Now _there_ was an example of a stray without any trust issues whatsoever. (Touko would have tolerated much worse than gluttony and climbing on furniture from the pet whose adoption had been one of the first signs that Takashi-kun considered their home his own.) “Alright,” she said. “You’ll both be home for dinner?”

“Unless sensei has run off really far this time,” Takashi-kun answered with a slight roll of his eyes that she knew was not aimed at her. Touko didn’t bother to cover the smile that his playfully adversarial relationship with his pet always provoked; it had been months since being smiled at too much had seemed to make Takashi jumpy.

“Alright. I should have eel bowls for both of you ready at six.”

“Sounds delicious.” Takashi-kun smiled not quite at her and vanished from the window, somewhat to Touko’s relief apparently intending to pursue his squirrel-chasing cat by way of the stairs, rather than jumping out a second-story window.

She returned to the gladiolus, the press of earth cool through her gardening gloves, and waved to Takashi-kun as he passed her on his hurried way out toward the fields and forest. He'd remembered his jacket, so that was alright. He waved back, but didn’t offer one of those painfully false smiles he’d used so continually when he first came to stay with them.

He looked awfully worried for his cat to just be off chasing a squirrel. Touko hoped Nyankichi-kun was alright.

* * *

Natsume got past the screen of brush near the house in time to see Sensei vanish under the eaves of the woods away across the broad meadows, still bounding after either a scent Urameshi had left, or something he’d seen that Natsume hadn’t. Now that he was out of sight of Touko-san, he broke into a run.

He expected to have to do a lot of running around and calling to track his bodyguard down once he got to the woods, but actually caught up with him only a few minutes later, sniffing around in a circle in a small grassy space where a tree had fallen a few years ago. It would be a very pretty dell later in the year, when more of the grass had grown back, but this early it was mostly just a sort of grubby sunny patch, with Sensei in it.

When he noticed Natsume coming he stopped scenting, hopped up on the mossy log, and acted as nonchalant as a small, roughly spherical creature could manage on short notice. Natsume slowed to a stop, breath ragged from having sprinted across three fields. “You lost him?”

Sensei poked his nose up into the air. “I don’t lose my prey! He’s just unusually fast.”

“So you lost him,” Natsume repeated, and sagged against the bole of the nearest living tree. “Was it…actually Urameshi-sensei?”

“How should I know?”

It wasn’t like Nyanko-sensei had ever met Urameshi before, it was true. The person in the tree had had attention that felt like…he’d thought it was the Burning Man watching him, but that wasn’t something he’d _known,_ just theorized— “Was he human, Sensei?”

“Hyeh!” Sensei made an utterly dismissive sound. Then he was silent for several seconds. “Maybe!” he barked.

Natsume’s mouth fell open a little in dismay. Sensei’s nose had been confused before, like that time with Kai, but Kai was neither human nor youkai, he was a forgotten god _._ For Sensei to _admit_ he couldn’t tell— “How is there a maybe?”

“Judging by his scent, the answer is maybe.” Sensei shrugged, pricked up his stubby tail, and beginning with a long leap began to trot back toward the Fujiwara home. “If he used some power, maybe it would be easier to say. Come on, we don’t want to miss dinner.”

“ _Sensei_ , what do you mean maybe?” He’d been wearing his same clothes from school, Natsume thought. It was hard to imagine an ayakashi dressing that way except as a disguise— _even_ as a disguise—but it was harder to imagine a human teacher standing in a tree like that, or vanishing from it that smoothly.

“I mean maybe! His scent is confused. Maybe it’s the smell of a weird youkai who spends a lot of time around humans, maybe it’s the smell of a weird human who spends a lot of time with spirits! I don’t know, stop asking me things, let’s go eat.”

They weren’t going to miss dinner, Touko-san had still been gardening _ten minutes ago_. “Sensei…aren’t I a weird human who spends time around spirits?”

“Weirder.” Sensei stopped and bent his head around to look back along the curve of his body, and smirked. “Bet you didn’t know that was possible.”

“You’re annoying,” Natsume sighed, and caught up with his bodyguard, who swarmed up his side to perch on his shoulder. Of course he’d known it was possible; he’d met Matoba. “Thanks for trying to catch him, though.”

His nerves were still jangling wildly but he didn’t think he sensed anyone still watching him. He took a last slow look around the glen, in case anything had decided to pop out of hiding, before turning back toward the house. Unlike a real cat, Sensei didn't dig claws into his shoulder.

At least losing the trail meant they’d make it home for dinner. Which was good because missing Touko-san’s unagi-don would make _Natsume_ sad, so he really didn’t want to deal with Sensei’s complaints about it. Especially when _another_ teacher of his was giving him this much stress already.

_He rose from the dead a powerful sorcerer…he rose again the most powerful of demons…._

The mid-levels had made it sound almost like…like the Burning Man everyone was hiding from had been a human conjurer once, like Natori. Or Matoba. Would that kind of person still smell human? Or…sort-of human?

And all the little spirits had begun hiding…the day before Urameshi-sensei appeared at school.

But if the person impersonating a teacher at his school was also the kind of person who fought evenly against an important god…what could he want with _Natsume?_

* * *

Urameshi Yuusuke strolled down the street toward his rented room. Which was upstairs from a cutesy little bakery. Man, this town. He guessed it was pretty, if you liked that kind of thing, but everything was so _dinky._

A week into this gig, and the shine was wearing off. He was glad he’d never gone to high school; it was obviously even more of a drag than middle. Seriously, all that studying just to get into _another school._ And then another one after that! Entrepreneurship was where it was at.

The kids were pretty funny, though. Scampering around when he whistled and hissing like teakettles when he messed with them. Man, it took him back. Not that he’d ever _gone_ to high school, and not that he’d attended gym class much in middle school even when he hadn’t been dead, but…

Yuusuke wasn’t the type to get nostalgic, at least not the melancholy kind, especially not for vague things like ‘being human,’ and it wasn’t like he’d ever _enjoyed_ going to school. He wasn’t sorry he’d quit. He _definitely_ wasn’t sorry he’d gotten killed at the start of his third year of middle school, missed a few months, and returned to a much weirder life with all kinds of things he’d never had before, like friends and options and the ability to punch somebody’s lights out and have it actually make a difference to the world.

But he was feeling nostalgic anyway. For cleaning Kuwabara’s clock twice a week and shaking younger kids down for spare change and shoplifting and blowing off class.

…he’d shaped up a lot, since that first time dying.

That said, he could seriously use a smoke. He wondered if it would blow his cover to pick up a pack. Gym teachers could be smokers, right? Even if it wasn’t setting a good example? Ah, hell with it. He was just a substitute. He ducked into the quaint little shop it’d taken him two days to realize was a conbini in disguise—whole entire town had _no cigarette machines_ what was this place? Disgustingly wholesome, that was what.

The lady in the shop asked how his first week at the school had been, so apparently smoking gym teachers were okay as long as they didn’t light up on the job. It had been weird enough when she asked if he was new in town and if he was staying long and stuff, without _remembering the answers._ “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he shrugged. “Dumb kids, but they’re okay. I just have to get them through to the term break.”

The clerk took his money but took her time making change; there wasn’t a line forming so the only person she was inconveniencing was Yuusuke. “It must be hard,” she said sympathetically, “moving all the time.”

Yuusuke shrugged. He’d been glad to come home after his years touring Makai, but they hadn’t exactly been _hard._ Of course, he had plenty of friends on that side to crash with, and it was a place where beating in the faces of anybody who crossed you was valid social interaction. “It’s a living,” he said. Grinned. “Thanks for worrying, neechan.”

She _blushed._ She was like ten years older than him. Small-town humans were hilarious.

He wasn’t actually in town for the money. At least, he did like money, and it was funny that the school was paying him for infiltrating them _on top of_ his fee for being here at all, but that had never been what the detective business was about. Between his noodle stand and his shifts at Yukimura-ya he was basically a full-time noodle guy these days, but he didn’t have it in him to stay in one place forever.

Keiko understood. (Yukimura-ji understood, even, and he didn’t even know what Yuusuke _was_.) As long as he always came back.

So Keiko’s cousin Keiichi was visiting all month and covering enough of his shifts for him to give in to Jun-chan’s blandishments and repeated pay raises. He’d been hoping the job would be more exciting; if he continued getting more bored at this rate he’d have to jump-start the case to a hasty conclusion, so he could spend more of his vacation in the Makai.

It would be a bad idea to really go traveling, he’d lose track of time, but he could drop in on Yomi for a few days. Old four-ears would keep track of time _for_ him, he was fussy like that, and Shura was always up for a spar. Maybe he could even get Yomi to stand him a round. He’d never _won_ , but he got a little closer every time he got his ass beat down. And Yomi wasn’t a total sadist like Mukuro, so losing to him only hurt a reasonable amount.

He couldn’t go visit Hiei and Mukuro though, they were absolute bastards and he’d wind up hanging around for weeks, getting messed with. He needed to make time sometime soon to go annoy Hiei.

It was nice having friends.

He tossed the clerk a two-finger salute and shouldered his way out of the stealth conbini. He had a feeling things were going to get at least a little fun here before he left, possibly a stupid kind of fun and _potentially_ the kind of fun where he got arrested for faking documentation to get access to high school students. Probably not, Mom _and_ Kurama had helped with the faking. If he did get arrested, he’d get to find out if Mom’s yakuza contacts were extensive enough to get him out of trouble in a nowhere town halfway across the country. That should be fun. She’d be so pissed.

Yuusuke grinned as he broke into his pack of cigarettes and tapped one out. Anyway, all good vacations included some running and screaming.

He grabbed a cig with his lips, flicked a flame into existence at the end of one finger, and took a drag.

Of course, his odds of getting busted had gone way up today. If Useless Claw tattled about spotting him earlier, and any adults actually _believed_ him, substitute gym teacher Urameshi might get a little bit more investigated. And the forgery probably wouldn’t stand up to that. Standing in a tree outside the target's house and waiting to see how much power it took for him to notice hadn’t been the smartest play.

The kid made such hilarious faces when you scared him, though. It was hard to resist. Yuusuke would figure he wasn’t the only one who thought so, and that was why the kid acted so squirrely, but he hadn’t seen anyone bothering him so far. Human or otherwise.

If it wasn’t for the weird-ass cat he wouldn’t be sure the kid wasn't just the normal kind of weirdo.

Oh well. If he didn’t get so bored he had to bail, he had another two weeks before exams came around, and he could hang around during those too, even though there was no such thing as a gym exam.

…he didn’t think. High school was weird. He should probably look into that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also yeah this story, despite only being willing to be written in summer, is actually set in March; Natsume is coming up on the end of his second year of high school. However, Kumamoto Prefecture is about as far south as you can get in Japan, leaving out Okinawa, so a notably warm March is going to be averaging the low 60s(F), with highs approaching 70.


End file.
